But shipping is in service of curiosity, though! There is nothing more fascinating than watching your work come into contact with real users. They will find error modes and use-cases you never imagined. If you code for fun and no-one ever sees it, then you'll never have this experience.
>web dev/gradle/java knowledge to build something like this
Web dev (and not just in java) is dominated by "component integration" concerns, containing lots of structure but little content. Computation is delegated to libraries, and the problems more about complexity of integration (at build time) scaled distributed systems (at runtime). In contrast, writing a simulation is computationally intensive, so most of the code is content. It's homogenous where web dev is heterogenous. The problems are entirely constrained by single process performance within a time budget determined by fps.
All that means is that you can focus on one runtime. I suggest the browser, since it solves the distribution problem. Ganja[1] is perhaps the ultimate "content, not structure" simulation project. It's very strange, and lies unmaintained because it's impenetrable. Yet it works. A bit more structured is D3 who's authors have written cutting edge visulation/layout algorithms for you, for example in support of force directed graphs[2]. A more friendly way to get started would be with some variant of Processing[3], which started as a Java thing and then got ported around, including to Python and JavaScript. A word of warning: something like cloth simulation is to a game engine what a single cell is to a mouse. Game engines are huge, in other words, and again you won't be writing simulations, lots of (internal) integrations.
>Things don't deserve loyalty. Your company is a "thing".
A country is a thing and loyalty to it is called "patriotism". A sports-team or TV show or band is a thing, loyalty to it is called "fandom". Loyalty to an idea or philosophy is called "being principled" or "idealism". Do you believe that things don't deserve loyalty, such that all of these are errors? Or do these examples not capture the sense of your statement?
Yes, all of these things do not deserve loyalty. There are values i hold dear, if a philosophy or state holds on to the same values, i support them. If they turn away from them, no reason to be loyal.
Strictly speaking, a philosophy can't turn away from values. A person can, but philosophy itself is, to a first order approximation, an immutable bundle of values.
Of course this naive view quickly falls apart when interpretation comes into play, as it always must. In the extreme, one may assert that "philosophy" is encoded in the behavior of it's adherents, and these behaviors may have little or nothing to do with the "canonical" representation of the philosophy as immutable text. Or more precisely the behavior and words can be profoundly decoupled. Many examples of this decoupling occurs to your thought (and mine). So when you say that a philosophy can "turn away" from values, in this sense that is true.
I prefer to think of philosophies as a kind of Platonic ideal, which are then subject to all the foibles of the humans who associate themselves to them. There are some subtle problems with this view, which I'd rather not confront.
Strictly speaking you are right. But words change meanings and philosophies get hijacked, deformed and loaded with barely affiliated concepts or movements.
So the idea as it was might be a value, but what the word means may decay into something frankenstein wouldn't recognise as his handy work .
A nation can change, a people can become corrupt, the values stay and if for example a democracy steered by corrupted peoples betrays itself, a democrat with values can just soldier on without getting into any loyalty conflict. A sadness for what has fallen may linger.
Your use of language is imprecise. What exactly is meant by "my country" here?
We have the state; we have the ruling regime; we have the society in question. Who is this "country" that is right or wrong exactly?
If the state, then in the abstract, it is authority without particular directive. So it can't be that.
If the ruling regime, then it can undermine its own authority by demanding people commit evil deeds. But it is not betrayal to refuse to commit the evil deeds it demands. It is the ruling regime who betrays the society it rules by demanding evil. Remember: lex iniusta non est lex.
If society, then we're talking about an aggregate and therefore mob "rule". But who cares what the mob thinks? The mob has no authority.
Betrayal and loyalty can only be measured in relation to the objective good. I agree with you that "my country, right or wrong" might suggest something very evil, but to reject the suggested relativistic understanding of loyalty is not betrayal. You could interpret it differently: I am loyal to the good of my country, regardless of whether my country is in the right or in the wrong. And the good of my country might involve opposing an evil regime or standing up to the mob. That's true loyalty. Obedience to evil is false obedience and true betrayal.
That's right, they do not deserve loyalty. All of these things hijack our loyalty to people in the name of some higher-order goal. Sports team and TV show loyalty is there to get us to consume more. Loyalty to a country gets us to be reliable cogs in someone else's grand project. Loyalty to a philosophy gets us to be a cult leader's acolyte.
Skip the substitute and go for the real thing: loyalty to people. You can still join grand projects, but do it consciously rather than on instinct.
>Sports team and TV show loyalty is there to get us to consume more.
A less cynical take: there seems to be some research that following sports fosters greater social connectivity and well-being. It may just be that we're hardwired to be tribal. From that context, sports seems to be a relatively benign way to tap into that.
Your examples are bizarre (sports teams are a matter of petty entertainment, not proper objects of loyalty). Philosophy isn't an object of loyalty either.
However, you should acquaint yourself with the principle of subsidiarity. Loyalty, duty, and love radiate outward from those who are owed the most diminishing to those who are owed the least (spouses, then children, then parents, etc., all the way through extended family and then community and nation and finally the human race). The loyalty is to the objective good. How that is expressed will be modified by contingent factors particular to a given person's situation.
Hey, you can do a real-world test to see if I'm right or you are right. Go to a football match (soccer for Americans), find a group of hooligans and tell them their team sucks. If you are right and it's just petty entertainment - you'll be just fine.
The problem here is that Forster is relativising the good.
I am not betraying my country by refusing to follow laws or decrees that require that I engage in intrinsically evil deeds. I am not loyal to my friend if I do evil things he asks me to do.
Our loyalty is to the objective good of our country and our friend. Otherwise, there is no such thing as loyalty.
There are situations when you genuinely must betray your country to protect your friend, or vice versa.
For example, if your country is a multiethnic empire that is unsustainable as a single entity without compulsion and forced assimilation, and your friend happens to be an ethnic minority in it.
What does it mean to betray someone? If a friend intends to murder someone and asks you to keep that secret, would telling the police be a betrayal? Would keeping it secret be an expression of loyalty?
Loyalty and betrayal cannot be understood in purely subjective terms. It must always be grounded in the objective good.
In your example, you haven't provided enough information to judge how exactly you would are betraying your country. However, if your country is doing evil things and you defend a friend from those evil things, then you aren't betraying your country. The government in question is betraying your country.
"I must admit that when my friend first told me of his plan I was sorely tempted drop off an anonymous tip recommending that the Archduke postpone his trip to Sarajevo..."
> A country is a thing and loyalty to it is called "patriotism".
That sort of loyalty is not quite the same: protecting your own to indirectly protect yourself. People often see their “external tribes” as an extension of their self much likely they do family/friends, rather than them being part of it like a company. I am a Spillett. I am a Yorkshireman, I am English, I am UKian, I am European, I work for TL. Notice the difference in language in that last one.
This is part of why some get so offended when you poke fun at their town/county/country: if they see it as an extension of their identity more than just somewhere they live then your disrespect is a personal attack. They would not likely defend their employer nearly as passionately.
> That sort of loyalty is not quite the same: protecting your own to indirectly protect yourself.
I would argue that this is a tit-for-tat, and as such, not really an example of loyalty per se. Loyalty would be protecting your country even when it doesn't actually benefit you and yours in any tangible way. And it has all the same problems as corporate loyalty, really.
>protecting your country even when it doesn't actually benefit you
Perhaps this needs some nuance. It seems like duty has some relevance here. Military service may not actually benefit someone directly, and it could easily be a detriment at the individual level. But societies struggle to operate effectively for very long when everyone takes an individualistic transactional mindset. At some point, it becomes a collective action problem that needs to find a balance between serving a sense of duty to society as a whole and society not taking advantage of such sentiments.
Patriotism is as we know a loyalty to real estate. Borders do change all the time if history is viewed from few steps back. In fact, everything changes - languages, culture, traditions and so on.
Where I come from in Europe - they say we have proud history going back some 1500 years. Well before that, there were other tribes, we are same type of immigrants as current waves. We either mingled with them, killed them or drove them away. I am pretty sure genetic tracing would favor the mingling for the most part.
What makes more sense is really what all others say - pick up a specific set of people, philosophy, moral imperative etc. and be loyal to them. Higher concepts muddy the waters with slippery slopes and are unnecessary, just opening surfaces to manipulation.
Sports franchises are the ultimate trick, in that they are profit-oriented, yet they somehow play on our tribal nature and fool us into forgetting about the profit part.
Definitely. Universities keep asking for money even after you've completed the transaction. We wear the shirt and tout our pride. Win the hearts and minds. Perfect marketing play.
Patriotism is mostly just propaganda to make people willing to kill and die for some old cynical geezers' delusions of grandeur. The guy said it right, countries don't deserve loyalty either. Lots of Russians are figuring this out firsthand these days.
>So in what way does this help the American people?
Shutting down Mitre and the CVE is against American interests, both public and private. That said, you can make an argument, one that revolves around cost (was the CVE DB worth $50M a year, especially given its backlog?). The other part of that argument rests on assuming there will be a private or semi-private replacement for the service, that there may be many of them, and therefore they will improve. One might assert, as libertarians do, that every service that's not monopoly of force should be private.
These aren't great arguments. $50M does seem like a lot, and maybe it could be reduced. I'd love to see an actual analysis of their operations rather then just ending the program. The second argument is worse. NIST and NOAA are examples of agencies that punch above their weight in terms of cost/benefit (the CFPB as well), and it seems like for-profit NIST and NOAA doesn't make much sense. But yes its worth considering the pros and cons of publicly funded service versus the private versions, in general. Even a bad argument is better than no argument, and the current admin does not bother to make one.
You seem to be doing a cost/benefit analysis. The sense we have is that the people doing the dismantling either have not done such an analysis or are at the very least keeping it from the public.
They have absolutely done a cost/benefit analysis. It works like this: "If it does not benefit me personally, directly and financially, then it costs too much."
In my country such things are discussed in parliament during endless sessions about the yearly budget.
They are not decreed by a god emperor at a whim.
I find this hard to believe. Every country has various conditions and scenarios where the leader is granted god-like powers. ex: In Canada Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act for the first time ever during covid. My understanding is that it was intended for 9/11-type actions, not protesters who should have been arrested weeks earlier.
What country are you in?
This is not quite correct. The Emergencies Act was preceded by the War Measures Act which was used during WWI and WWII as well as during the "October Crisis"[1].
But yes, the intent is for events that threaten the nation, not protests.
There is no physical force in the universe that causes words written on a government letterhead to mean anything. The exact same government that granted you "inalienable rights" will ignore them when it's corrupted.
There is no way to construct a government such that it CANNOT execute a minority if enough people want that to happen.
The only answer, as it has always been, is to ceaselessly, diligently, and without fail, never vote in people like Trump.
Unfortunately, the republican party has spent every single moment since Nixon's resignation ensuring that the party would never let that kind of thing stop them again.
> The exact same government that granted you "inalienable rights" will ignore them when it's corrupted.
Checks and balances, multiple branches aligned along different timescales, and mandatory minimum change periods. E.g. the states that require consitutional amendments to be voted for in two consecutive elections
And all of that buttressed by belief in institutions and the consistency that effects.
> was the CVE DB worth $50M a year, especially given its backlog?
This is more or less a common rhetorical argument made by republicans after cutting budgets. The agency (organization, etc) is ineffective now, so we should terminate it, rather than fund it so it may be more effective.
It’s a very silly statement as well! Is having a single source of truth and the reference point for every publicly disclosed cybersecurity vulnerability worth $50M/year?
It is not even argument that it is ineffective. Large backlog can mean it is ineffective or it can mean that there is more work to do then resources allow. There is no way to distinguish these two without further info.
I almost edited my comment to anticipate this comment. It is not large compared to the budget. Nothing is. It's large in absolute terms. $50M is a lot of spend compared to most businesses with a similar scope. The product is a database of information other people report, naively it seems like a lot. It doesn't have any of the complexity of most businesses. This is not to minimize the work of fixing messy input, reproducing and properly cataloging vulnerabilities, etc. That budget is ~250 workers (assuming $100k/year with 100% overhead), ignoring infra. More than anything I'm curious how the money is being spent because without knowing that it's impossible to judge whether it's bloated or not.
>More than anything I'm curious how the money is being spent because without knowing that it's impossible to judge whether it's bloated or not.
Exactly. And it's totally fair for anyone to question the cost. However, the current administration is destroying things with the precision of a Jackson Pollack painting and no such reflection is happening.
Question the cost how? By saying "is this alot?" Then performing no further investigation to confirm that or make a comparison basically leaving the question open which causes random to assume it's "alot"
I can say "Gee whiz $335M per F-22 seems a bit much!" without being an expert in jets, military equipment, or going into the details of its production. I know a bit more about software so I can safely say something similar about MITRE. The fact that I don't want to spend my time doing (frankly, rather useless since I'm not a journo or in government or influential at all) investigative journalism into the specifics doesn't invalidate my opinion. Random people will read random things into whatever random content they consume; deep in an HN comment thread this is of little concern.
>I can say "Gee whiz $335M per F-22 seems a bit much!..specifics doesn't invalidate my opinion.
You shouldn't and it does invalidate your opinion.
You're an engineer and this is HN so shouldn't making a comparison or judgment be backed up by some factual information?
>The fact that I don't want to spend my time
You don't have to make the comment.
>. Random people will read random things into whatever random content they consume..
Don't you feel that a comment akin to "government be spending alot" is almost like spam considering how often it's mentioned? If you had some information that showed that for what we are talking about then that would be substantial.
I don't support this decision, but it's not like the $50M here is the keystone for the entire budget. It's actually easier to cut the smaller components and looks like progress when you're not making much movement.
What does it cost to lose the control over it? I'm sure the an equivalent database could be maintained in another country for a lot cheaper, like in China or Russia.
$50 is about $7 per American. Could MITRE be more efficient? Yeah maybe. Probably, even. But cutting off funding entirely isn't the way to make it happen. This decision isn't about saving the American taxpayer money, it's about weaking the US, and it serves exactly one person.
It won't be. Willful ignorance is a cornerstone of the movement. You can't lie about what you don't know. You can't have a bad take if you don't know. Upton Sinclaire said in the 1930's: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Now add to "salary" "identity", "relationships", "sense of belonging to the group". This is why critical, independent thinking, speaking truth to power, must be separately honored and encouraged by a healthy culture, because these attributes are by default mercilessly punished. (Physical courage and heroism are honored by a healthy culture for similar reasons.)
I mostly agree, although I really disagree with 'speaking truth to power' — I feel like the outsized reverence for this is exactly what got us into this mess. For YEARS, there's been a culture of celebrating opposition for opposition's sake, a performative stance of always positioning oneself against the perceived holders of power, rather than critically evaluating the actual accuracy or value of what's being said.
Democrats are repeatedly pilloried simply because they govern while the Republicans cosplay as a permanent opposition, and therefore became 'the power' to speak against. Governing inherently involves trade-offs, compromises, and complex realities that never match ideological purity. Thus, an atmosphere developed where people who engaged in governance—and therefore took responsibility for difficult, real-world outcomes—became easy targets for criticism that was more interested in the aesthetics of "truth to power" than in providing accurate analyses or constructive solutions.
As a result, "speaking truth to power" became a performance, disconnected from accountability or genuine insight. The loudest critics weren’t necessarily those with the most accurate or useful truths, just those who most visibly positioned themselves as opposing power structures. This reinforced public cynicism and undermined nuanced understanding of governance and policy, further obscuring genuine critique and necessary reforms.
I agree that "speaking truth to power" can, and has been, abused. Treated as an end unto itself it becomes mere contrarianism, and loses the "truth" part of the phrase. I mean it in its original sense: speaking up when it is dangerous for you to speak, particularly when you have evidence of misdeeds by the powerful (the lack of evidence is another pervasive issue with most online speech - mere allegation against those you don't like is enough, it seems, for most people). When the government can disappear its critics and optionally suppress news of the disappearance, then critics deserve praise and honor.
I worry that practical tips to deal with an unjust system, and success stories that demonstrate their use, undermine the will to fix the unjust system.
Regular LLMs are quite bad at it (see simonwillison's blog post). However this paper [0] describes an apparently sound approach using Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs), however their github repo [1] has been "code coming soon!" for months now, so you can't really use it.
I wonder if a mechanical watch could communicate something via radio with some clever placement of magnets and copper on the movement via Faraday induction. Imagine movement that encodes a simple BT handshake. On the more science fiction side, a very tiny Difference Engine that fits on your wrist (I am reminded of a Young Ladies Primer from The Diamond Age, where the compute was nano-mechanical).
A useful analogy is natural selection. The two features, mutation and selection pressure, are present in software. From the inside, the mutations seem rational, controlled, planned, but from the outside they are random. The selection pressure is itself complex, but success can be measured by "number of copies in the world", which is ultimately driven by social success and luck as much as anything. Software also has a (unique?) "win more" mechanic where a popular tool tends to get more popular. The pressure happens recursively at different scales, and sometimes very large branches tend to die off because of big topics like "lack memory safety" or "supply chain attacks".
Interestingly, language diversity seems driven by school curricula, which becomes comfort which becomes hiring practice, the change driven by academic boredom with a given language.
> Software also has a (unique?) "win more" mechanic where a popular tool tends to get more popular.
I don't think this is unique at all to software tools and is a general principle.
Rosen had a paper in 1981 talking about "The Economics of Superstars" [0]. I don't claim to have deep knowledge but the idea is that if an individual has limited resources (money, attention, etc.) and wants to ensure the maximum gain from their expenditure, then allocating resources to the superstar is a safer bet. This means that superstars get proportionally larger resources than what they might be valued at.
For example, if 120 consumer has $5 to spend on a song ($600 total), each consumer on an individual level might allocate their $5 on the known good superstar song. The superstar song might only be 2x better than the next best thing, so one might expect that the superstar song might, at most, get $400 of the total, but because of the superstar effect, the superstar song gets all $600.
I just watched an interview with Torvalds about Git. There were a lot of reasons why Git was so quickly adopted, not the least of which was functionality and how it leveraged a changing technology landscape, but a major factor was almost surely Torvalds celebrity status and blessing.
Thanks for the link - that was great. Yeah, with some exceptions (15 million merits being one, given that it's pure allegory) the show seems to ask, "given some new technology, what is the cruelest most horrifying situation in which it could be used?" This basic premise can indeed be applied to anything, past or present. Personally I'd take the automobile, call the episode "Meat Grinder," reference the ~30k deaths/year in the US from car accidents, noting the ambivalence of literally everyone to that fact.
This is a great idea. Like a 1905 person’s weird vision of the 1950s— getting a bunch of things wildly wrong, like fashion and geopolitics, but strangely accurately describing a fledgling attempt to mandate ‘seat belts’ and criminalize drunk driving, so as to diminish the tens of thousands of preventable traffic deaths yearly, against the lobbying efforts of industry and the insouciance (and even outright opposition) of the public.
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